


The Golden Floor

by mrhiddles



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Death, Disease, M/M, Torture, angst up the wazoo, never meant to write this but oops had a stroke of midnight feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:59:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrhiddles/pseuds/mrhiddles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They broke him in the pit. A hole of musk and insects and creatures too small and too dangerous for the light of day. They broke him there. It took three days. He was mindless by the fourth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Golden Floor

**Author's Note:**

> I sat down with the intention of finishing the second chapter of Fall a Little Harder, but then this happened instead.

They broke him in the pit. A hole of musk and insects and creatures too small and too dangerous for the light of day. They broke him there. It took three days. He was mindless by the fourth.

“Let me go home. Let me go home,” he had pleaded. Promises, he remembered in an echo of a thought. Another life, never his, never—

“No,” they said.

“Please, please, please…” a slow chant, meaningless to the towering shadows.

“No.”

It took three days to break him.

By the fourth his soul was lost and he could not remember his name.

He only knew one name anymore. And he was dead too.

\--

“Brother, why tarry on this? I thought we were done with training.”

Thor paced before him, eager in his steps and eyes bright with laughter. His smile was plastered there to his smug face, but—no, not smug. Loki was mistaken on that bit.

“We are done, I merely wish to wrestle. Like the old days!” Thor sheathed the blade he’d been swinging around at his hip, hanging it on the weapons rack just off the courtyard. He ran back and was waiting on Loki.

Loki tossed his to the grass, not caring entirely for the state the sheathe found itself in by the end of the day. He’d already used it to butt Thor several times in the nose on careless turns. Loki had always been better at defense.

Thor crouched low, readying himself, Loki mirroring him. It went as an unsaid request not to use his magic, so he wouldn’t. No doubles today. Just like when they were children.

They still technically were.

“Then come, or are you frightened?” mocked Loki. Thor’s smile widened.

And then he charged.

\--

The first day he’d screamed. Covered in red searing lashes and still-bleeding punctures, he’d screamed for the one he still remembered, the one he still knew to be his, until his throat was raw and he feared he would soon cough up blood.

Down here there was no place to sit comfortably, or sleep, or shit, or piss, or even eat for there was no food. There was never food.

That first day it was only dark and the silent terrors of the night he thought himself so familiar with.

The screams started again, hoping it would summon the rain.

It didn’t come.

\--

Loki first felt truly alone around his fourteenth name day. It was a small thing. And to think on it now brought the barest grimace of embarrassment. They had been children, just children. But Thor, older than him by only a handful of years, had chosen going with Odin to fawn over his new toy over training with Loki. Loki had begged to go, in his own way. Terrified in a way he’d never been, all at the prospect of Thor moving on without him.

Thor saw him cry that day. It was a shame he knows Thor will never unsee in him.

Loki promised himself he would never beg again.

\--

The second day there was a hole in the sky. A beam of light a quill wide shot through the universe to pierce the floor just beside his knee, revealing a small disc of gold, and Loki marveled at the sight. So long, it seemed, without light.

They would bleed for this.

He had stopped screaming.

He was used to being alone.

\--

Sometimes he wonders what it would be like to write letters to those he’d killed.

Thor would end up with the most, and it is that fact that makes him scrap the idea entirely.

Another shame only Thor would be concerned with.

Another notch upon the beam.

\--

Asgard once had a pit like this.

His wounds had not yet healed. With what magic he had sealed, he could do nothing to help the process, the pain. Everything was beginning to blur.

Odin was the only one who could unbind the ancient runes that so withheld his power, and now that he was dead the power to unbind went to Thor.

But Thor was gone. Loki would perish here. There was no other tale.

\--

“I love you,” Thor once told him.

Loki had stared.

“Do not say stupid things.” And there had been such vicious _bite_ in his voice.

Thor never said it again.

Maybe it was the fear, maybe it was something else. Maybe it was because by then they had already lain together and words like that were not for their kind.

Never meant for them at all.

\--

Time here was like walking between worlds. Up was down and the rules of reality could be bent to the whim of those who knew how to bend. But without his magic, Loki was but a god, a mortal god, but still—god. A god living in darkness.

They called him marauder. Like they didn’t want him here.

How is that?

\--

“Balder is dead.”

Thor had thrown him through a wall when they returned to the palace. Asgard had shaken apart with the powerful thunder, filled with shining light with the shock of lightning. Gold flecked from the walls like paint and the columns were paper in the face of Thor’s rage.

That day, Loki had been caught in a net, fished out of the water and carried back for his due punishment. Worth it, for the look on Odin’s face when he finally saw him.

“Look at that, I’ve now taken both sons,” he had whispered against Thor’s feverish skin, red and hot from anger and betrayal and too many other emotions the fool could muster no name for.

Thor had broken three ribs, collapsed his trachea as he’d held him against a wall and choked the life bit by bit from him, had fractured bones and bruised and bloodied and _used_ him until he could hardly stand to walk.

Loki had called him brother again and again, because by then, he hadn’t said it in years. All with a smile on his face.

They had wrestled and sparred as children, but this was battle. This was war.

They had come to expect no less from one another.

\--

Maybe if they were to meet again, under other circumstances, under another sun, perhaps it would be better.

He was hallucinating now.

It happened one night, day, night, he didn’t know. Thor was there, hand pressed warm and soft against a bruised and bloodied cheek, skin dry and cracked and split and his eyes running constantly. Tears or fluids, the difference was nonexistent.

He’d begged for Thor that night. Loki broke one of his only promises to himself. Again? The first?

There were only a few others left.

How long had he really been here?

\--

They came one time with darker intent than letting him lie injured. Other than beating him and leaving him to gaze to the blackened sky, ceiling? Wishing for that beam of light. Wishing for someone—

Loki wanted to be used by only one, but this-not this.

Thunder broke across the distant stars like a calamity long waited for.

Loki couldn’t remember if one could imagine sound.

\--

Nameless, nameless.

Just a body of an unwanted giant, soul gone and cracked like the eggshell it was born as.

Thor was here, sitting cross legged and watching him with a pitiless frown. Thor never pitied him in his mind. Or, maybe he had that wrong. Maybe it was the only place Thor did. He didn't know--

Whenever he touched shaking, unbalanced fingers to Thor’s—not Thor, never Thor, not him—he feared the day they did not pass straight through.

Like a ghost that could not fly but chose instead to sit, with him, in agony always.

A ghost who did not know it.

\--

“How old are we?”

“You are a thousand and forty-one and three days. I am a thousand and thirty-nine and four months.” Loki turned the page he’d been reading, glancing at Thor to ask, “Why?”

“We should do something.”

“Never took you as one for obscurity. Why? It’s hardly as if you’ve reached an age of rite.”

“Not just me.” He flipped a wrist at Loki. “That year you turned a man you took down your own boar, you can hardly complain.”

“And you took down an entire bear. On Jotunheim.”

Thor pursed his lips, rubbing at the hair on his chin. He looked more like a boy than he had in years just then. “Yours was Elvish, they are quick.”

“Aye, they are indeed.” Loki closed his book and slid it to the side of him. “You had a feast not three days past, what is the occasion today? What would you have us do?”

Thor grinned, offering up a grunt of approval. “Journey with me and I will show you.”

\--

Nails dug into the back of powerful thighs, busy between his legs, and it felt like Thor really was the thunder.

Goldspun hair curtaining their vision and hot breath meeting wet tongue and lip and neck and those blue eyes burning into his and oh.

Oh.

This is why Thor never said those words again.

\--

That had been a thousand lifetimes ago. For a god, too many, for a mortal, not enough. What was he?

On the day he felt his vertebrae grind to ash and his eyes give way to blindness, Loki knew he was Loki and heard the thunder and saw the light chase gold.

He felt the hum of Mjolnir sing through his very heart.


End file.
